Monday, August 24, 2015

Recently, hackers stated they had hacked the Ashley Madison website, where users have registered and paid to meet other people willing to commit adultery. The hackers calling themselves the Impact Team, threatened to release the names, financial data and sexual fantasies of members of the Ashley Madison website. As a result, Ashley Madison and a related website Established Men, both owned by Avid Media Life, were under threat by the hackers for weeks.

On August 18, 2015, the personal and identifying data for members of the Ashley Madison website was illegally released to the public by hackers and the document dump contains 1,000,000 unique email addresses, names, credit card numbers and other related information. Despite the fact the Ashley Madison site boasts 37,000,000 members, some people maintained multiple accounts, which means the site likely has 1,000,000 unique users/members, not 37,000,000.

The hack and release of private data identifying site members has damaged many relationships. Divorce lawyers have reported an increase in calls regarding people who discovered their spouses are registered members of the Ashley Madison website. Celebrities have also been caught up in the scandal, as having used the website.

The premise of the Ashley Madison website, which is “Life is short. Have an affair” is a terrible one. So many people around the world have been hurt by a site that never should have been created in the first place, as it promotes adultery, which is harmful and hurtful. Now families are being destroyed as a result of the web site’s existence.

The FBI is currently investigating the hack, as it has violated scores of federal laws (not to mention, some of their names are probably on the site as adulterers). Avid Life Media is also going to be crushed by a flurry of lawsuit from all over the world. The Ashley Madison website was a bad idea that has and will further prove quite costly.

Tue Aug 18, 2015 10:01pm EDT Related: U.S. - Hackers have followed through on a threat to release online a huge cache of data, including customer information, that was stolen a month ago from cheating spouses website AshleyMadison.com, several tech websites reported on Tuesday.

Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the authenticity of the posting. The data was posted onto the dark web, meaning it is only accessible using a specialized browser, although vast lists of hundreds of email addresses including many linked to corporations and universities sprouted up on other sites hours after the news broke.

The hackers, who call themselves The Impact Team, leaked snippets of the compromised data in July and threatened to publish names and salacious details of as many as 37 million customers unless Ashley Madison and EstablishedMen.com, another site owned by Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, were taken down.